New schedule repeats feature

Right now I have a “summer” schedule for drip watering my potted plants. In the summer they dry out faster than the winter so need to be watered an extra time.

I will disable this schedule once “winter” starts. But it occurred to me that this enabling/disabling could be automated. Some thoughts on how this would work:

  1. add start/stop dates to the schedule
  2. add some kind of weather intelligence conditions such as daily high temperature > 85 degrees. Or maybe evaporation rate based trigger.

@sbillard, great idea! I know our product team is currently discussing this logic. Others, please “+1” this feature if you’d benefit from it.

Hmm, interesting. I know we can accomplish the temperature trigger using an IFTTT recipe. An ET based trigger would be interesting. Usually this is calculated on a daily basis and therefore in practice with Flex schedules. How do you see a stand alone ET trigger working?

Thanks for sharing these ideas. Please keep them coming!

How do you see a stand alone ET trigger working?

I am not really sure, it is a thought in process. The pots are watered each morning. When the weather is hot and dry they cannot make it the whole day, so need to be watered in the afternoon. The idea is to somehow figure out when they need to be watered in the afternoon.

@sbillard, thanks for the added detail. That would require some changes to how flex conducts it’s weather checks and allowing for multiple flex schedules on one zone. A work around would be to add a fixed schedule that’s triggered by IFTTT at temperature. The flex schedule would then record this into your daily moisture level graphs as a manual run. Do you think this would work?

Best, Emil

That should work. I guess I need to read up on IFTTT. I am not conversant with it.

Ok, I have looked into IFTTT. I could use some advice.

It looks like I can trigger on current temperature > 85. What happens if the temperature fluctuates around 85? will the “THIS” be executed each time it crosses from below 85 to above 85?

There is also a tomorrow’s forecast high. Is there a way to use that to skip tomorrow’s run of the watering schedule?

@sbillard, sorry, I forgot to reference a support article for you. For anyone else interesting in using IFTTT with their Iro, please see this support article.

That’s a good question. I cannot comment myself, but I’m hoping someone else that has used this recipe can.

We could trigger a rain delay based off of a high temperature using this recipe.

Hope this helps.

the rain delay in that recipe seems to stop all watering for the device. Not at all what we want. Just want to stop one schedule.

Sorry. Perhaps this recipe? It will skip a watering time if the forecasted is over X temp.

Sorry, I mis-stated my original thought. I don’t really want to stop the schedule I want to run/enable it.

The idea would be that I would have a “summer pots” schedule that is disabled normally. If the high temp is going to be above 90 tomorrow I would like to enable tomorrow’s schedule but only for tomorrow. If the temp will be below 90 I would like to disable the schedule.

Problem seems that there would need to be a “THIS” for tomorrow’s high not exceeding 90 as well as the one that triggers if it is above 90. There would also need to be receipes to enable and disable a watering schedule.

I don’t see those missing items. But maybe someone can point them out to me.

Maybe the best hope would be to have recipes that enable and disable schedules. Then I could use the current temp > 90 to enable the schedule and current temp < 90 to disable it. Not ideal, since that would require that the temp be over 90 at the time the schedule would run. But putting some tolerance in the numbers might work–over 90 and under 80 might work.

It occurs to me that the schedule could also be disabled every night so we don’t have to worry about the temperature variance. Just have to schedule the watering after the hottest part of the day.

@sbillard, this should be easy to setup in IFTTT. I know of many people using it to trigger a “disabled” fixed schedule iff (if and only if) the temperature exceeds a given threshold (i.e. 90 degrees). This recipe should do the job; you can set the schedule to run and temperate to run it at.

Hope this helps :blush:

Ok, I did ask earlier what happens if the temperature goes greater than X, drops, then goes greater again. No one has responded to that question.

I am assuming I would get multiple instances of the schedule running then. That is why I was looking for the means to enable/disable the schedule. Then it would run only once on a given day.

But I guess I can try this and see how it works out.

@sbillard, I’ll setup an IFTTT recipe setup on my system to test this. Might not know the results until later in the week when we’re back in the 90s.

Let me know if you give this a try. We can track the watering events in your activity feed and/or IFTTT activity logs.

Best, Emil

Maybe next week it will get hot enough to try this:)

@sbillard, looks like the recipe is triggering one time per day…

Hope this helps.

1 Like

Great. it is in place. But of course now the heat has not turned up…

Well, the IFTTT triggered today, but at 6:00pm.

Not really sure why it triggered so late, usually the temperature is dropping by then. Anyway, it does point out a flaw in this recipe. I really want the watering to happen around 2-3pm if it is going to be hot (or is already hot.) So back to the original request. Can I get a set of Iro actions that enable and disable schedules?

@sbillard, thanks for the update. I can’t promise timing or anything, but we’ll discuss as a product team.

Have a wonderful week!